This comes less than two months after the Essential first started shipping, and less than a month after a report from BayStreet Research estimated that only about 5,000 Essential Phones were sold to consumers in the United States in September. Even if that number is off by an order of magnitude, that still represents a very low share of phones shipped. Not selling the most is, of course, Essential’s framing for this phone, and if they’re comfortable only selling a handful of these devices, I would prefer to see a more experimental product rather than a fairly generic Android phone.

Astute readers may recall that the 8GB model of the original iPhone also received a $200 price cut about two months after it was released, and the 4GB configuration was discontinued. For comparison, Apple sold their millionth iPhone just a few days after that price cut was announced.1